Archive for May, 2012

ARTstor and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation have released more than 750 images of major artworks from the permanent collection in the ARTstor Digital Library. This first release amounts to 11% of the Guggenheim Foundation’s projected 7,000 images of art, exhibition installation views, and architecture. Future releases will include 5,000 installation views spanning from 1990s to the present from the Guggenheim Museum in New York, more than 1,000 installations views from the museums in Bilbao and Venice, and 200 historical and contemporary photographs documenting the architecture of these three museum buildings.

To read more about the Guggenheim Foundations collaboration with ARTstor, click here. To view Guggenheim collection images in ARTstor, go here(UCD viewers only).

This Friday (May 25th), the UC Davis Art History Program will hold its annual MA candidate symposium under the title “Aesthetics and Affects in Ages of Crisis.” Six candidates will present their final thesis research:

The Library of Congress recently announced the digitization of the Frances Benjamin Johnston lantern slide collection. Johnston (1864-1952) was a photographer and advocate of the garden beautiful movement. In support of this movement, Johnston toured the US and Europe during the 1910s and 1930s, presenting lectures on historic gardens and plant life. To illustrate these lectures, Johnston used her own images. She transfered 1,134 of her black and white photographs to lantern slides which she then hand-tinted so that she could illustrate her popular lectures for garden clubs, museums and horticultural societies in color. Johnston’s photographs depict more than 200 sites — primarily private gardens but also horticultural shows, a public library and museum, and several parks. The slides focus on the American East, West, and South but also include some images in Italy, France, and England.

The Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT) has launched a site making the photographic archive of Machiel Kiel, the former director of the NIT and a renowned Dutch scholar of Ottoman architectural monuments in the Balkan countries, available to the public. Created for the most part between the 1960s and 1990s, the Kiel Photographic Archive contains visual documentation of many monuments that have not survived or have been significantly altered during the second half of the twentieth century. The publication of Kiel’s archive by the NIT is hoped to significantly advance international research on this heritage.

As of May 2012, the NIT has almost 1300 images digitized and processed pertaining to Ottoman-Islamic architectural monuments in the Southeast-European countries (outside Turkey). The next phases will process images of monuments in Turkish Thrace and Christian monuments and mural painting from the Ottoman period.

It’s time again for the UC Davis Film Festival hosted by the Davis Varsity Theatre. The 12th annual festival of short films plays Wednesday and Thursday, May 25–26, at 8:30 p.m.

This year’s submissions include a mockumentary about a washed-up child star, a comedy where three twenty-somethings attain mundane abilities after eating a very old casserole, an existential drama about a woman struggling with her life’s purpose, an animated action hero adventure and a documentary about finding the perfect bone marrow donor.

This years finalists survived a rigorous selection process. According to film festival adviser and Art Studio Professor Darrin Martin, “student enthusiasm for more sophisticated approaches to expressing themselves through filmmaking is on the rise as they strive to master the language of a media-saturated culture. Curiosity for the voices of tomorrow’s storytellers, animators, and moving image makers should be the motivating factor to get the public out for two evenings of entertaining and thought provoking works.”

Tickets are $7 and $10, available at the Davis Varsity Theatre box office starting May 16.